Why the writer sat down with a classmate called A

No one, the Korean essay begins, goes through a life without a crisis. Some crises are small — a late bus on the morning of an important meeting. Some are private and large: illness, a death, a livelihood that gives way. The writer belongs to the generation that was in school with the students of Danwon High, and had watched the Sewol ferry disaster of 2014 leave a long trauma. The assignment asked for an interview. Friends with student loans were close at hand. The writer chose someone else, because the course was an introduction to social welfare, and the point was to hear a person who needed services, and to ask whether Korea’s welfare had been enough.

A was a high-school classmate, then at another school. She lived with her father, her mother, and one older sister. The father had run a small factory. Trade had risen and fallen, but manufacturing had given the household a fairly steady income — until, in A’s first year of high school, he had a stroke. The money he had put aside went to surgery, a hospital stay, and rehabilitation. The mother has diabetes. What remained, A said, was a small living allowance the factory still sent, as a matter of decency, and whatever the much older sister earned.

A tight month, a school missed, a pension not yet in reach

A could not ask the household for tuition. She was receiving a national scholarship and a campus award for students from families with a disability, and she was taking out student loans for the rest. Her father was not yet 60, and she was anxious that a disability pension might still be refused or under-graded. The review for that pension, she said, did not simply follow the ordinary disability grade. Her father had hemiplegia, could not get a glass of water by himself, and had lost ground in speech and in cognition, and still the family feared the award would not match what they saw.

The hardest strain, in A’s account, was not only money. It was mental: a mother who barely went out because she was nursing, an older sister who had become the practical head of the house and had to put part of her pay back into the home, and A herself, who sometimes missed school to care for her father when her mother was unwell. The four of them, she said, were living on about 1.5 million won a month at the time of the interview, covering ordinary costs, apartment maintenance, and interest on the apartment loan. A worked a part-time job for her own phone and transport, and her grades suffered. The parents were only in their early fifties; a public pension would start at 60. They expected at least five more tight years. A disability pension, she had learned, could not be drawn together with the national pension; the household would have to choose the larger sum. A severe-disability payment from the health ministry was described in the essay as about 200,000 won a month, and hard to combine with the national pension. These figures are the ones the interview recorded then, not a claim about today’s rates.

What the writer thinks a safety net still owes

The father, A said, already had a first-grade rating for a brain lesion, but people actually drawing a disability pension often found the pension grade lower than the disability grade they lived with. The National Pension Service, in the essay’s account, reviewed the grade itself and sorted it into four steps, with the monthly amount tied to average income during the insured period. The interview gives a then-current example: for an average monthly income of two million won, a first-grade award was about 475,070 won, a second-grade award about 380,050, a third-grade award about 285,040 — a gap of up to about 200,000 won. The review was done by people, and only once, so a lower grade than the family’s daily life would suggest was a real fear. A also said she had not been given a clear account of what benefits the household could already claim, or might yet claim. Information, unless one went looking on a website or at the social-welfare desk of a community center, was easy to miss.

The writer’s conclusion is careful. The stroke was not an industrial accident, and not a public disaster. In that sense the event was private. But a household that does not receive benefits it could receive, or never hears that those benefits exist, is, the writer argues, a social failure. The safety net, not the mother or the sister or A, should have to carry this family. The interview left three practical needs: a pension grade aligned with the actual disability, free counseling — at a public health center, the writer suggests — for the stress of those who provide the care, and a way to find useful information without a special hunt. The writer also felt the need for a professional carer when the women of the house could not be there. The crisis, in this account, is not only the day of the stroke. It is the years of waiting that follow, and the quiet labor of the people who stay. The longer Korean version can be read on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student crisis-intervention account based on an interview with a classmate whose father had a stroke, and whose household was still waiting on a disability pension.

Last updated 15 November 2026